Basic Week 5: Cakes, Fruits, Chocolate and Wine!

A new month, Feb has started and the schedule looks easy going sessions wise, with couple of day-offs before the final exams, which is on 15th and 16th Feb. We have 4 days of holidays before the next term, Intermediate starts, and again a couple of days off after it starts.

The week started with theory lecture on Fruits. We saw and tasted a wide variety of fruits from apples to durians, and from berries to mangosteen, from mangoes to ugli fruits. I’d never heard of or seen many of these fruits. It was very interesting for me to know all of these amazing fruits from different parts of the world :)

Soursops

Rhubarb

Durian

Snake fruit

Rambutan

Ugli fruit

Then, next recipe lesson was about bavarian creams and mousses. We learnt to make Charlotte au chocolat i.e Chocolate Bavarian Mousse cake encased with light chocolate sponge with pistachios, decorated with chocolate garnish.
This is the first time I was using a ring to make cake. It was quite interesting to see how all the components involved in the recipe are assembled to construct a nicely finished, well decorated, restaurant style dessert cake.

Charlotte au Chocolat

Chef praised my presentation and garnish. :) It tastes as sinful as it looks! :P

Next up, was the Wine lecture. A different faculty member(the only Indian faculty in LCB), not a chef, conducted this lecture. He talked about not just wine, but about all types of alcoholic beverages in general including fermented drinks, spirits, liqueurs. He then explained about different types of wine production methods and tasting techniques. We tasted two types of wines, red and white. Overall, it was an interactive session.

Wine class setup

Wine tasting

I knew nothing about alcohol and was almost blank before this lecture, but after it was over, I gained some useful knowledge about this important ingredient (liqueurs/alcohol) used in patisserie. Yes, alcohol is everywhere in french pastry, it’s an integral part of it, so a pastry chef has to know all about it. :)

Then we had another interesting lecture on Chocolates! Chef showed us a short film on how the chocolate is made right from scratch. We walked thorough the entire process from how cocoa pods are harvested from theobroma cacao trees to the final product dark, milk and white chocolate made to be sold in stores. You will be shocked to know that white chocolate is not a chocolate actually…It is 50% of cocoa butter+milk and 50% of sugar!!! ;)

Cacao Pod and Beans

After this, for the last practical of the week, I made a very unusual, funky kind of looking cake, which is called Gateau St Honore!

Gateau St Honore

It is a classic french cake. The base is combination of choux pastry and shortcrust pastry. Inside is filled with pastry cream and top is decorated with caramel dipped profiteroles on edge, and herringbone piping design in the centre. It looks different but tastes good :)

Gateau St Honore

It is named after the French patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, Saint Honore or Honoratus, bishop of Amiens.

The week ended with demo of Charlotte au Cassis, which is a potential exam dish. The other two potential exam dishes are Lemon tart and Genoise with raspberry jam. Any of these three can come for the practical exam.

Everyone is talking about the exams and studies now as it’s really close, just one week away!